Why are Japanese films so terrible?

xp yeah the film is a bunraku adaptation

Colt Is My Passport very good yeah, def the highlight of that criterion Nikkatsu set

Samurai Wolf I & II. was expecting generic samurai stuff but there was a style to them that raised them above. this was post Fistful of Dollars ('66 and '67) and had obviously taken some cues from that (which, yeah, had itself taken cues from Yojimbo). pleasantly surprised.

i think the only other Gosha i have is Three Outlaw Samurai, his first, and the various others that are available are Yakuza based but I'll see.

in the meantime i have Ju-On and Sister Streetfighter on the way from arrow, to mix things up a bit.

Hideo Gosha is great, he reminds me of a Budd Boetticher or Phil Karlson - unpretentious artisan working in genre cinema whose sensibilities just happen to line up perfectly with his subject matter. Aside from the Samurai Wolf films I've also seen Sword Of The Beast (which was on Criterion) and his masterpiece, Goyokin (which I had to track down on a dodgy dvd). The only yakuza film I've seen of his is Violent Streets, a bit more outré than the swordplay stuff but well worth seeing.

One thing you can find in every one of his movies is the kind of hatred of authority that only a guy who lived through something like Imperial Japan could develop.

I caught Evil Does Not Exist on AppleTV and thought it was better than Drive My Car!

Maybe Hamaguchi needs his own thread?

a Ryûsuke Hamaguchi thread for all your Hamaguchi chat